A few years ago, I wrote an extended piece bearing the title The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?. Recently, in response to a couple of engaging (relatively) meas culpas—Matthew Continetti’s The Right The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism and Tim Miller’s Why We Did It—I began preparing an update. I originally planned to…
Search Results for: Robert Gates
Who won the Cold War? Why, Jimmy Carter, of course!
At least, that’s the way Chris Miller tells it in Chip War The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, his best-selling but not always convincing story of the computer chip and how it “changed the world”. It seems that in 1977, Silicon Valley entrepreneur William Perry was brought in to serve as undersecretary of…
Yo, Adam Smith! That whole “invisible hand” thing is looking kinda shaky these days!
Oh, yeah, a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on, and what’s shakin’ from the tree looks pretty goddamn gamy these days, starting with Elon Musk, who’s been giving an excellent impression of the world’s richest 13-year-old for some time now, but recently upped the ante by about a 1000 percent, half destroying the company he just…
CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally.
OCTOBER 6, 2022 UPDATE: In the course of this report—somewhere in the middle—I discuss crime data from the FBI. I should have pointed out that these data are estimates rather than complete tallies. We don’t know, for example, that there were 10,440 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, although the FBI says we do. I…
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood: not entirely the all-out misogynistic gore-fest I had been expecting!
When Quentin Tarantino was a young man, he had dreams, as young men do. These are among the things that Quentin Tarantino dreamed: That he would kick Bruce Lee’s ass; That he would save Sharon Tate’s ass; That he would have a pitbull that would bite people on the ass (also the nuts); That he…
Chuck Hagel—“Pour encourager les autres”*
One of the comparatively few attractive things about President Obama is his dislike of the “ritual dismissal”—the Washington practice of figuratively beheading a pre-eminent DC playa, not really because his departure will make a difference as much as the sheer pleasure involved in seeing an important somebody get his butt publicly kicked. Well, a foolish…
They’d none of them be missed
A week or so I tried to dismiss two former SecDefs (Gates and Panetta), who should be both gone and forgotten, using the headline “They’ll none of them be missed,” which led me to go on YouTube and look up performances of the Gilbert and Sullivan tune “I’ve Got a Little List” (aka “As Some…
There are markets, and then there are markets
I agree with the Wall Street Journal on a dismaying number of issues. Free trade is an easy one—increasing incomes abroad while decreasing the cost of living at home has always seemed like a no-brainer to me. Like the Journal, I have a hearty dislike of subsidies—farm subsidies of course, but energy as well. Clean…